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How does gender affect the attack strategies of political actors? Do men and women diverge in their propensity to go negative and in their choice of targets? Extant research has long sought to shed light on these questions (e.g., Brooks 2010; Kahn 1993; Krupnikov and Bauer 2014; Proctor, Schenck-Hamlin, and Haase 1994; Walter 2013). Among all the possible determinants of attack behavior in elections, candidate gender has been one of the most “heavily studied” (Grossmann 2012, 2). However, the relevant research focuses almost exclusively on the United States and therefore on a system with candidate-centered campaigns, weak party organizations, and winner-takes-all competitions. Notwithstanding the importance of the USA as a case and exporter of campaign techniques, such context is specific and likely to bias the results. The few pioneering studies that examine the role of gender in negative campaigning outside the U.S. (Carlson 2001, 2007; Walter 2013) have addressed this question mostly by transferring the analytical framework of U.S.-based research to other political systems. Consequently, they have barely begun to incorporate the distinctive features of multiparty systems and strong party organizations as determinants of gender differences in attack behavior. The present article provides a novel argument about the role of party environments as a crucial context factor in party-centered political systems. Specifically we argue that in party-centered campaigns the gender balance within parties influences differences in the attack behavior of male and female politicians.

We present a new method to analyze party manifestos to benefit the placement of political parties per se and to advance the study of elections. Our method improves on existing manual coding approaches by (1) generating semantically complete units based on syntax, (2) standardizing units into a subject–predicate–object structure, and (3) employing a fine-grained and flexible hierarchical coding scheme. We evaluate our approach by comparing estimates for the 2002, 2006, and 2008 Austrian national elections with those yielded by previous studies that employ the entire range of available measurement strategies. We also demonstrate how we link our new manifesto data with other kind of data produced in theAustrian National Election Study, especially mass and elite (party candidate) surveys.

How ambitious are MPs in European parliaments and how does progressive ambition affect their strategies? We argue that progressively ambitious members of parliament try to generate individual visibility and seek the support of party leaders who decide on promotion while at the same time ensuring reelection by adjusting to electoral system incentives. Using novel data from a 15-country MP survey we show that progressive ambition is widespread in Europe and Israel. As hypothesized, progressively ambitious MPs are more likely to favor personal rather than party-centered electoral campaigns and to address the national or regional party leadership instead of their local party. Electoral system features and party ideology also have the theoretically expected effects.

Individual politicians and political parties can be linked to their (prospective) voters by various means (Lawson 1980; Müller 1989; Kitschelt 2000b). The three most commonly referred to in the literature, beginning with Max Weber (1976), are policy, clientelism, and charisma. As charisma is a rare gift and hardly any Western party nowadays builds exclusively or overwhelmingly on the charisma of its leader I will not address it here. It is sufficient to note that charisma can be combined with any of the other linkage strategies. Likewise, policy and clientelism can go together. Moreover, I take it that policy linkage nowadays is the rule in Western democracies. Although this is probably more true at the normative level – the self-presentation of the relevant actors – than empirically, electoral politics are mostly policy-driven even in the countries that are labeled “high in clientelism” below. If anything, clientelism is nowadays less important for tying voters to political parties than two decades or more ago. Hence, the chapter is interested in the question of which institutional features make it more or less likely that linkages based on policies are accompanied by clientelistic appeals (and potentially provide for clientelism as the main linkage mechanism).

This chapter employs the definition of clientelism used throughout the volume as particularistic and direct exchange between clients and politicians.

Leaders of political parties often have to choose between conflicting objectives, such as influence on policy, control of the government, and support among the voters. This book examines the behaviour of political parties in situations where they experience conflict between two or more important objectives. The volume contains a theoretical introduction and case studies of party leaders in Germany, Italy, France and Spain as well as six smaller European democracies. Each case focuses on the behaviour of one of several parties in situations of goal conflict, such as the 'historic compromise' in Italy, the 1982 Wende in West Germany, the making of the new Swedish constitution in the 1970s, and the termination of the Austrian 'black-red' grand coalition. In their conclusions, the editors discuss how such leadership decisions can be understood and examine the causes of different choices among party leaders.

Political leaders routinely make momentous decisions, but they cannot always get what they want. Very often their important choices feel both difficult and painful. This is sometimes because these leaders have to act on the basis of incomplete information or because they realize that their options are risky. But it could also be because they have to abandon one goal to attain another. Politicians feel the tug between conflicting options as much as anyone else. Even when making decisions does not mean choosing the lesser of two evils, there may well be severe and uncomfortable trade-offs between different goals they have set themselves. Leadership frequently means making hard choices.

In modern democracies, the leaders who make these choices are highly likely to be party politicians or indeed party leaders. Political parties are the most important organizations in modern politics. In the contemporary world, only a few states do without them. The reason that political parties are well-nigh ubiquitous is that they perform functions that are valuable to many political actors. Political parties play a major role in the recruitment of top politicians, on whom the momentous and painful political decisions often fall. With very few exceptions, political chief executives are elected on the slate of some established political party, and very often the head of government continues to serve as the head of the political party that propelled him or her into office. Democracy may be conceived as a process by which voters delegate policy-making authority to a set of representatives, and political parties are the main organizational vehicle by which such delegation takes place.

If political science is both the study of public decisions and a dismal science (along with economics), it is because public decisions are often inherently difficult and unpleasant. Public life often presents decision makers with unwelcome trade-offs, with choices they would rather not have to make. This volume has examined the decisions of Western European party leaders in a variety of situations of goal conflict. Clearly, these choices induced a great deal of agony, they were often controversial, and they may have caused a fair amount of regret. In many cases, they may have puzzled the immediate observer and called for an explanation.

This book has examined a number of such hard and critical choices. In each of these cases, as outside observers, and sometimes with the considerable benefit of hindsight, we can identify the objective dilemmas faced by parties considering, for example, government participation, coalition termination, or constitutional reform. Such analytical efforts are helpful, but they still leave us at some distance from the world of party leaders themselves. And such descriptions are themselves of limited value if they do not help us understand the situation in anything like the framework adopted by the relevant actors in the parties themselves.

Political parties are by no means all alike, nor are the choices their leaders make. Hence, generalization about their behavior is an endeavor fraught with difficulties. While the behavior of political parties has always been of central importance to political scientists, the progression of our understanding of these matters has sometimes been slow.

Starting from the relative success of the Austrian economy in the 1970s the problems of industrial policy and the position of industrial policy in the context of economic policy are examined. Policies directed towards improving the industrial structure have had a lower priority than policies aimed at producing sufficient total economic growth to avoid unemployment and disputes over the distribution of the GNP. The structure of Austria's foreign trade shows that Austria still has not achieved the industrial structure appropriate for a small industrial country in an exposed geographical position. In Austria the problems of industry are regarded as legitimate affairs of government and, although there is criticism of the details of government intervention, the economic responsibility which is conferred on the government is an extensive one. Austria's political culture exhibits both consociationalist traits, with most laws being passed with the support of the two big parties,, and ‘social partnership’ in the form of voluntary co-operation between the unions and employers' associations. The political consensus means that discussion tends to revolve round technical rather than fundamental issues of industrial policy. Since the early 1970s the preservation of full employment has become the dominating industrial policy goal of the Austrian government; as a result, policy is mainly reactive rather than proactive. Fiscal investment aids are by far the most important industrial policy instrument, though their use has been criticised. There are also direct expenditure schemes, aimed at particular sectors as well as the general stimulation of investment; these aids have also been criticised. The prospects for the introduction of industrial policies more focussed on qualitative changes in industrial structure are not considered good, but political stability seems assured.

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